Web sites on the World Wide Web (“Web”) provide a multitude of services to users and organizations. For example, a user may employ a web site to host email, manage credit cards, pay bills, plan trips, oversee health records, and/or administer any digital information pertinent to the user and/or an organization associated with the user. Typically, web sites that provide services are owned and/or operated by disparate entities. Moreover, each entity that provides a web site service may possess a proprietary authentication system, requiring the user to remember account information (e.g., username and password) for each service.
The information stored and/or provided by web site services may be useful to applications external to the web site services. For example, the user may want credit card transactions, supplied via a financial institution web site, imported into a financial application running on the user's computer system, e.g., QuickBooks® (QuickBooks® is a registered trademark of Intuit, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.). Because the information is supplied through the browser, no simple means exists to import the information, and the user is required to manually enter the same information from the web page into the financial application.